Search

The neurofilament (NF) is a member of the intermediate filament family, which is composed of different proteins but all having the same width, approximately 10 nm diameter. Among intermediate filaments, NFs have unique chemical and structural properties. They are composed of three distinctly different proteins called triplet proteins (NF-L, NF-M, and NF-H) and are constituted morphologically of two distinct domains in vivo: core filaments and cross-bridges laterally interconnecting the core filaments. Core filaments are ∼10 nm thick, and cross-bridges are much thinner, 3–5 nm thick. Cross-bridges are constructed from carboxy-terminal tail domains of NF-M and NF-H. When NFs are isolated in vitro, they are observed to be constructed of core filaments and long projections extending vertically from the core filaments. The projections, 3–5 nm in width, correspond morphologically with the tail domains of NF-M and NF-H and are much longer than cross-bridges, but with similar widths. The projections have ramified meshwork-like profiles, whereas the cross-bridges are smooth and straight; however, the projections are the structural scaffolding of cross-bridges, although the mechanism whereby projections are converted to cross-bridges is unknown. Although the tail domain of NF-H is longer and can be phosphorylated more extensively than that of NF-M, curiously NF-M appears to be more essential to form cross-bridges that are related to orienting core filaments parallel and increasing axonal calibers. However, cross-bridges are still constructed even in the presence of the NF-H tail alone without the NF-M tail, and more importantly, the cross-bridges are almost normal when having a phosphorylation-incompetent NF-M tail and an intact NF-H tail. I still have a question whether the NF-M tail or the NF-H tail is essential for cross-bridge formation but emphasize in this chapter that both tails are involved in the bridge formation and are able to compensate for each other when either protein is absent. In this reciprocity between NF-M and NF-H, phosphorylated tail domains of both proteins would be necessary. That is, normal cross-bridges are not as frequent as in either NF-M or NF-H tail-less mice when compared with wild-type mice expressing both tails, suggesting strongly that both tail domains are necessary for typical cross-bridges. When cross-bridges are not formed in the absence of both NF-M and NF-H tails, core filaments without cross-bridges are irregular in alignment, resulting in the impairment of axonal transport of membrane-bound organelles, even where microtubules are normal in appearance. Although it remains unresolved how projections are converted to cross-bridges, it seems certain that cross-bridges are an essential structure in axons, especially in long projection axons where NFs are extremely numerous. Cross-bridges are critical to enhance resistance of NFs to mechanical stress in elongated, nonrigid axoplasm and also to create a constant space between core filaments for the axonal transport of various organelles and molecules regulated by microtubules and their associated proteins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a projection-based generalized neural network, which can be used to solve a class of nonsmooth convex optimization problems. It generalizes the existing projection neural networks for solving the optimization problems. In addition, the existence and convergence of the solution for the generalized neural networks are proved. Moreover, we discuss the application to nonsmooth convex optimization problems. And two illustrative examples are given to show the efficiency of the theoretical results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An approach is proposed that allows the development of coherent scenarios of climate changes, ecosystems evolution, and trends of hydrological and hydro-meteorological disasters. This provides the base for more adequate and accurate forecasting of disasters, and to integrate the developed forecasts into the decision making systems. The approach allows the examination of regional risks features in the context of global changes, permits the analysis of both the general and separated peculiarities of dangerous processes and, finally, builds the disaster management measures into the regional land-use and development strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

2D micro scanning mirrors are presented which make use of a degressive spring allowing to achieve an optical scan range of up to 112° x 84°, optically. The scanning mirrors are deployed for highly miniaturized monochrome and full color projectors as well as for laser imagers. The projectors allow for projection with VGA resolution at 50 Hz frame rate. The laser imager supports full color SVGA resolution at 30 Hz frame rate. Both, the projector and the imager are based on a single 2D scanner chip and thus could be combined in a single ultra compact system for simultaneous imaging and projection with high depth of focus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nonlinear Integrals is a useful integration tool. It can get a set of virtual values by projecting original data to a virtual space using Nonlinear Integrals. The classical Nonlinear Integrals implement projection along with a line with respect to the attributes. But in many cases the linear projection is not applicable to achieve better performance for classification or regression. In this paper, we propose a generalized Nonlinear Integrals–Polynomial Nonlinear Integrals(PNI). A polynomial function with respect to the attributes is used as the integrand of Nonlinear Integrals. It makes the projection being along different kinds of curves to the virtual space, so that the virtual values gotten by Nonlinear Integrals can be more regularized well and better to deal with. For testing the capability of the Polynomial Nonlinear Integrals, we apply the Polynomial Nonlinear Integrals to classification on some real datasets. Due to limitation of computational complexity, we take feature selection method studied in another our paper to do preprocessing. We select the value of the highest power of polynomial from 1 to 5 to observe the change of performance of PNI and the effect of the highest power. Experiments show that there is evident advancement of performance for PNI compared to classical NI and the performance is not definitely rising as the highest power is increased. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use a moving parabolic approximation (MPA) to reconstruct a triangular mesh approximating the underlying surface of a point cloud. We suggest an efficient procedure to generate an initial mesh from a point cloud of closed shape. Then we refine this mesh selectively by comparing estimates of curvature from the point cloud with curvatures computed from the current mesh. We present several examples which demonstrate robustness of our method in the presence of noise, and show that the resulting reconstructions preserve geometric detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, a new classification model based on projection with Double Nonlinear Integrals is proposed. There exist interactions among predictive attributes towards the decisive attribute. The contribution rate of each combination of predictive attributes, including each singleton, towards the decisive attribute can be re presented by a fuzzy measure. We use Double Nonlinear Integrals with respect to the signed fuzzy measure to project data to 2-Dimension space. Then classify the virtual value in the 2-D space projected by Nonlinear Integrals. In our experiments, we compare our classifier based on projection with Double Nonlinear Integrals with the classical method- Naïve Bayes. The results show that our classification model is better than Naïve Bayes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chapter 5 of the book "Journey Across the Life Span" is presented. It describes the common characteristics of human growth and development. It explains the concept of the psychoanalytic theory of neurologist Sigmund Freud and offers information about defense mechanisms. It discusses the different stages of growth and development based on the psychosocial theory of psychologist Erik Erikson, the cognitive theory of Jean Piaget, and the moral development theory of psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg.

The Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) has drawn attention from psychologists and educators and has oriented their research, diagnosis, and educational work toward new grounds. We hold that, rather than a term to be added to conventional psychology and pedagogy, the ZPD provides us with an instrument whose use will inevitably lead to a reappraisal and renewal of theory. We suggest that this concept also operated as a Zone of Proximal Development in its own right for Vygotsky's theoretical thought. He focused his endeavors on the areas of conflict where his contemporaries ran into difficulties by exploring three theoretical frontiers: “1. The evolutionary and historical frontier (change and evolution of the child and individual, of the species, of cultures). 2. The identity frontier (the view of the functional system as shared, of functions as socially distributed). 3. The ecological frontier between the internal and external, the mental and the material, the organism and the medium.” A large part of the literature on Vygotsky and the research carried out on the basis of his ideas have developed his proposals with regard to the first two frontiers. Although the third frontier has received scant attention, it is in our opinion essential to a full understanding of Vygotsky's thought, especially the concept of ZPD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

These two scholars were more than a little acquainted: Vygotsky was Shpet's student at the Shanyavsky People's University, and he attended Shpet's seminar for two years. At the beginning of the 1920s, Vygotsky started to work at the psychological institute where, as Aleksei N. Leont'ev has noted, Shpet was the most famous professor. At the end of the 1920s, Shpet and Vygotsky both taught at the Pedology Department of the Second Moscow University. Despite all these connections, there is only one reference to Shpet in Vygotsky's works (in The Psychology of Art), and even this is only in passing. And Shpet's books Phenomenon and Meaning (1914), Aesthetic Fragments (1922), and The Inner Form of Word (1927), in which he discussed thinking and language, thought and word, meaning and sense, and external and inner forms of a word were all published significantly earlier than Vygotsky's Thinking and Speech (1934). Today, it is hard to guess why Vygotsky and his whole scientific school (Aleksandr R. Luria, A. N. Leont'ev, Aleksandr V. Zaporozhets, and others) ignored Shpet's works. It could have been fear or caution born out of Shpet's style of behavior and writing. This style was characterized by freedom and dignity and the independence of his thought from Marxist-Leninist ideology,which at the time was growing stronger and stronger. The Bolsheviks felt this independence, dismissed Shpet several times from his academic positions, and, in the end, arrested and shot him in 1937. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are many reasons why it is difficult for readers to analyze and to understand Vygotsky's terminology. He developed his psychology in a direct and indirect dialogue with many other authors. In doing so, he absorbed and processed all the ideas and terms that he believed could be useful. These ideas ranged from the philosophy of Spinoza and Marx to the American behaviorism of Watson and the linguistics of Sapir. However, when one meets a seemingly familiar term borrowed from some predecessor in Vygotsky's writings, one should keep in mind that he was likely to have modified the term's meaning. Another motivation for a logico-semantic analysis of Vygotsky's writings is the quantity, variety, and nature of his scientific heritage. A 1960 bibliography of Vygotsky's works includes 274 titles (Vygotsky, 1960). Excluding nonscientific articles and notes devoted for the most part to the events of literary and theatrical life (1916-1923), there remain around 190 works in psychology, written from 1924 until Vygotsky's death (June 11, 1934): a period of only ten years. Many items from this decade were written very quickly, in almost telegraphic style. Some works remain unfinished. It is certainly possible that some of the works that were published posthumously were not yet intended for publication (unfortunately, the editors of contemporary editions do not always warn the reader about the state and nature of the original texts). Therefore, when reading Vygotsky's works one needs to remember his own words (from a letter to A. N. Leontiev dated July 31, 1930), “our writings are imperfect but there is great truth in them. This is my symbol of faith. . . . ” (Vygotsky, 1960, p. 169). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vygotsky's most popular book in the English-speaking world, Thought and Language, was first published in English in 1962. (It was originally published in Russian in 1934.) When retitled Thinking and Speech in 1987, it captured a more active notion of these interrelated processes. They are seen as activities rather than entities and the book explores the developmentally changing relationship between intellectual and verbal processes. Vygotsky viewed speaking and thinking as dynamically related and approached their connection as “The complex movement from the first vague emergence of the thought to its completion in a verbal formulation. . . . Thought is not expressed but completed in the word. . . . Any thought has movement. It unfolds. . . . This flow of thought is realized as an internal movement through several planes. As a transition from thought to word and from word to thought.” (Vygotsky, 1987, pp. 249-250) Thinking and Speech presents important distinctions between communicative language and language used for conceptual representation. By addressing such broad themes, Vygotsky's work was grounded in philosophical, psychological, and linguistic traditions that have influenced Western students of language. Within these disciplines, the relationship between thinking and speech was forged, and it is still of great concern to contemporary thinkers. Part of what is so interesting about revisiting this relationship is that it emerges repeatedly across disciplines and informs every aspect of the human sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chapter 2 of the book "Psychiatric Mental Health Nursing: Concepts of Care in Evidence-Based Practice" is presented. It provides an overview of the historical development of psychiatric care. Several types of disorders which represent the individual's psychoneurotic responses to anxiety are explained. It discusses the types of responses related to maladaptive grief which was caused by loss.

It is because Elgar's symphonic narrative style, which my emphasis on the Augenblick brings into focus, is so contra-Beethovenian that total reliance on the Ursatz as a structural prop simply will not suffice. We can ask again the questions at the beginning of this book: is early modernist syntax basically Beethovenian–Schenkerian, and is Schenkerian analysis of it appropriate? Clearly there are vital elements of the common-practice syntax in Elgar, for instance his contrapuntal prolongation of diatonic triads and the dramatic opposition of subsidiary keys; but the syntax is taken to extremes that make an orthodox Schenkerian reading inadequate. First, contrapuntal prolongation will very often be off the triad rather than on it, either before or after an arrival: so, for instance, in the first-movement exposition of the First Symphony, the triad of A minor is prolonged first by a VI–V–i cadence, where VI is itself established so painstakingly that it almost sounds like a tonic, then in the development V/a is prolonged contrapuntally. A minor itself, however, only appears for a very short while (11:4 and 17:1). It is the movement towards and then sharply away from a goal that takes up all Elgar's time. Since in the pristinely cynical world all possibilities are equally undesirable, the only acceptable option is to procrastinate, which is precisely what he does. Second, in Elgar's immuring–immured tonal structure the opposed key is prolonged to such great lengths, and with its own subsidiary keys and Ursatz, that it becomes a tonality itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘A nice sub-acid feeling’: the First Symphony Before beginning a hermeneutic interpretation of the First Symphony, it will be useful to be reminded, briefly, of its structural outline. In the first movement, an Ideal Call in a confident but rather unconvincing immuring A♭ is challenged by the sudden entrance of a tonally unstable but A-minor-inflected Sub-Acid Theme, the first of the primary exposition materials. The exposition's trajectory to an immured A minor, and an essential expositional closure in that key at 17:8 with the Amfortas Tune, hinges on a pivotal F major, which acts as a dual agent: VI/A♭ and VI/a. With the full arrival of the immured tonic, the Kopfton is punned on and its structural function called into question. The rhetorical ESC (essential structural closure) at 44:8 is into the F minor of the Amfortas Tune's recapitulatory guise (NB this is the ‘pivot’ key in the minor mode): it is a ‘crisis’ in the movement, a non-resolution. The coda attempts unsuccessfully to re-establish the immuring A♭ as the movement's final tonic: the final recall of the Amfortas Tune in the closing bars, during which the stasis of the Kopfton is re-emphasized, undoes the coda's work. The second and third movements are directed teleologically towards the D major ‘Heaven Tune’ of the latter's coda, the theme which establishes the immured tonic as the stronger of the symphony's two tonalities by a considerable margin. On the way to this final telos there are other important events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analytical preliminaries This book, with its focus on the First Symphony (1908) and Falstaff (1913), addresses a number of problematic issues in the analysis of early modernist music. Chief among them is the difficulty of finding a way into an analysis at all. Which methodology is best to use as a basis for analyzing music that is neither classically common-practice tonal nor yet post-tonal, and which therefore inhabits a troublesome gap between idiolects that many people believe we have come to grips with? Post-tonal theories will inevitably miss the predominantly tonal surface and larger-scale architecture of much of this music, but an orthodox Schenkerian approach is always at risk of skirting round surface ambiguities for the sake of exegetical expediency, and its contrapuntal dependence on a form-generating opposition of tonic and dominant may be anachronistic in a style which has long since discovered other possibilities for structural tension. Section 2 will offer a methodological framework for the analysis of early modernist music in general and Elgar's music in particular. I want to suggest that a modified Schenkerian approach is the best way to pursue our investigation, because the kinds of difficulties we (viz. Anglophone musicologists) face when attempting an analysis of early modernist music invite us to think in terms of voice-leading and contrapuntal prolongation. When confronted, for instance, with a passage without any obvious cadence, we still search for contrapuntal configurations suggesting recognizably functional chords that we hear prolonged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]